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Composed during the Second World War (most of it at a Budapest monastery) and completed in 1944, Missa Brevis was first performed in 1945, just after the end of the war, at the Budapest Opera House (where Kodály and his wife had been forced to seek refuge during the final days of the conflict). It is one of his most notable choral pieces with accompaniment and subliminally conveys the suffering and uncertainty of that endless time during which Kodály risked his own life on more than one occasion. While all of this certainly helps to explain its powerful emotional and intensely dramatic qualities, more than anything else Missa Brevis is a hymn to hope, a musical poem of extraordinary transparency written in praise not only of the divinity that governs the destiny of humanity and nations but also, rooted as ever in the popular, of religious feeling, as manifested in believers for comfort and strength in the most difficult of circumstances.

Kodály: “Our age of mechanization leads along a road ending with man himself a machine: only the spirit of singing can save us from this fate.” With its vigorous lyricism, its vibrant intonation, but also its alternation between restraint and jubilation, the Missa Brevis is a formidable exercise in sonorous refinement, an amalgam of singularly rich and sensitive musical impressions, a source of constant enjoyment for any listener who demands of a composition not so much the somewhat banal power of relaxation but rather the momentary suspension of the “world’s prose”...